Nowadays, there are a variety of wireless communication systems, of which the commonalities are: the complication of stations' construction, the cable support needed by the base stations, and the relatively fixed coverage of the base stations. Due to the complexity of the wireless communication environment, such as buildings' obstruction in the dissemination path or obstacles between the receiving antenna and transmitting antenna of a base station and a user, a user may be in the blind area of a base station service. As such, although the user is in the area covered by the base station, he can not communicate with the base station normally, thus the user's communication quality is severely deteriorated; or even the user can not access to the system. For a user at the edge of a cell, the signal decays severely since the signal has traveled a relatively long path, thus the communication quality and service quality between the user and the base station is impacted, for example, in order to guarantee a user at the edge of a cell can receive the signal from the base station normally, a low order encoding and modulation method has to be applied, therefore the user's data rate is decreased; and if a high order encoding and modulation method is applied to guarantee the user's data rate, the communication power of both the base station and the use need to be increased, which will interfere other users in the cell and users in the adjacent cells. In addition, with the development of the application, these wireless access systems can not well meet the wireless access requirement of random burst and covering some areas unreachable by cable.
Therefore, in order to expand the coverage of the base station service area and improve the service quality of users at the edge of a cell, multiple types of relay systems have been developed so far, that is, the communication between a base station and a user is implemented through a relay station.
The relay system that emerged earlier is an analog relay system. After a relay station receives a signal, the signal received is analogically amplified without digital processing and then sent to a user, a base station, or the next relay station. This relay method is simple, but its disadvantage is obvious: besides the effective signal, the in-band interference signal received by the relay station is also amplified and sent in the communication path. Therefore, the reliability of the useful signal is decreased after passing the relay station.
With the development of technology, the digital relay system is becoming mature. The system can demodulate and decode the received signal to acquire the source signal, and after storing and processing the signal, the system encodes and modulates the signal again, and sends the signal to a user, a base station, or the next relay station. This relay method prevents the communication of the noise in the analog signal, and improves the reliability of the communication.
Generally, a wireless communication system provides a point-to-multipoint network topology structure for high-speed wireless data communication. In order to solve the problem in the communication quality of the users at the edge of a cell or in the blind area of a base station service, the concept of wireless relay station is introduced into the wireless network. However, the fixity, nomadic property and mobility of the wireless relay station is a new challenge for the management of the whole wireless network, such as dynamic construction and adjustment of the wireless network.
But the introduction of this kind of wireless relay stations greatly complicates the management of the wireless network. The construction, maintenance and optimization of the conventional relay stations are manually implemented, and the workload is very heavy for a practical application. Whereas a digital relay station can perform base band processing by itself, has a certain capability of control and resource scheduling, and is able to select a base station or wireless relay station to access to. These properties provide a basis for the self-configuration and self-optimization of the wireless relay station.
In a wired IP network, a routing table can be used to help a routing gateway to select the optimal path for route optimization, and the routing gateway needs to dynamically maintain the routing table. But this method is not suitable to apply in a wireless communication network, mainly for the following reasons:
Each node in a wireless communication network may cause the update of the wireless links due to the changing of the wireless environment status. This is different from the fixed connection in a wired network.
The reliability of a wireless link in a wireless communication network is different from that of a wired network.
Each wireless link in a wireless communication network needs to occupy wireless resource, and the wireless link occupies the wireless resource once it is established.
Based on the above problems, a new solution is needed to solve how a wireless relay station performs self-configuration and self-optimization in a wireless network.
In addition, for this type of wireless communication network, there is no reasonable solution provided in the prior art to solve problems such as how a wireless relay station to join a wireless communication network group, how to update a connection relationship, and how to terminate a connection relationship.